CAIRO: The Egyptian ministry of communications on Sunday revealed in a report that the country's major telecommunications companies earned LE 8.5 billion ($1.6 billion) during the first three months of 2009. That number is over one billion Egyptian pounds ($180 million) more than during the same period the year before. The report said that expenses from the companies during the period reached only LE 5.59 billion, a small raise from 5.36 the year before. This means that profits increased dramatically in 2009, despite worries the global financial crisis would hit Egypt, which is has not for the most part. It should be noted that another report published last Thursday by the ministry said the number of subscribers of mobile phones at the end of the first half of 2009 reached over 48 million, an increase of over one million from the previous year. The report stated that the goal of telecommunications companies is to reach intensity of mobile phone users by the end of the year to 63.5 percent of the country's 80 plus million people . Internet users, said the report, reached 13 million and 470 thousand users and that the proportion of Internet users per 100 inhabitants amounted to 17.7 percent, while the number of participants in the high-speed DSL Internet reached 848 thousand subscribers, still a fairly small number considering the size of the country. **reporting by Mohamed Abdel Salam BM
